Pankaj Mishra's photograph of the decade

Workers at the state-owned Shijiazhuang Changshan Textile Factory eat lunch surrounded by piles of fabric on 29 December 2004 in Shijiazhuang, in northern China's Hebei province. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images. Click on the image for the full version.

In 1949, on the founding of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong declared: "The Chinese people have stood up." Mao warned that China would be a "nation no longer subject to insult and humiliation".

In just a few sentences, he moved from speaking of the Chinese people to the Chinese nation. Many of those who speak of the "rise" of China today, whether with foreboding or gratification, also conflate the two notions. For them China's economic heft and military-political muscle-flexing adequately sum up the national achievement Mao promised in 1949. The "people" turn into a faceless mass of grimly efficient workers, no more possessed of human agency and dignity than their North Korean counterparts across the border.

But the story of China's emergence – which already seems the biggest of the last decade – is primarily the story of its people, their immense tragedies, struggles and forbearance. Chinese filmmakers from Zhang Yimou to Jia Zhangke have helped to give it a human scale. There may yet be a Chinese Zola or Dreiser to do literary justice to this extraordinary experience. In the meantime, let's linger over this image of what seems like a very brief moment of rest in a slightly superior sweatshop.

At least two generations of women are represented here. The parents of the older women would have lived through the terrible invasions and civil wars that blighted life in China before the communist revolution. They would have known the hopefulness of the first years of the revolution, the new opportunities, in particular, for women; their idealism would then have suffered the cruel tests inflicted on it by Mao's Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution.

Their daughters grew up in a politically more stable if still materially impoverished China. But in the post-Mao era they would have had to reckon with the destruction of their old certainties, familiar landscapes and personal relations – the disorienting experience of modernity, in which, as Marx famously put it, "all that is solid melts into air".

The younger women in the picture, on the other hand, radiate cheerfulness. Unscarred by the past, they live in a more hopeful and confident country. But this moment, too, may have already faded. Six years after this picture was taken, the women are probably still unable to transcend the particular degradations of an economy powered by cheap exports (forced migration, low wages, repetitive toil, long working hours). Enlisted into their country's most risky transition yet, they belong to the hundreds of millions of Chinese who may never stand up.